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names are better known to the world than those of the majority of double firsts – among them Clough, Mr M. Arnold, Mr Froude, and Mr Freeman. He was elected in the following year (1849), above twelve first-class men, to the open Oriel Fellowship, in the awarding of which the Examiners professed to regard originality and power of mind, breadth of culture and refined scholarship, rather than special knowledge. During that year, or the year of revolution immediately preceding it, the final blow had fallen on the fortunes of his family, by the unexpected emancipation of all the slaves in the island of Santa Cruz, without any compensation being awarded to the owners. He had looked forward to going to the English bar, and it had been an object of his ambition to be able, by his success in that career, to repair the fortunes of his house. But he accepted cheerfully the necessity now imposed upon him of supporting himself, and he at once took up the rôle of a private tutor, by which, in conjunction with his fellowship, a sufficient income might be made. His success was immediate, and the result of it may be said to be lasting, as he introduced a revolution into the traditional teaching and studying of what had been for forty years the great Oxford text-book, the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. This had been taught to their pupils by private tutors, many of them very young men, who either repeated with variations the tradition they had received from the tutors of a former generation, or if they shared in the vague speculative enthusiasm on ethical and religious subjects which was then in the air, struck out a new tradition for themselves. There was much in this teaching that was interesting and stimulating; and it served to bring out, what is sometimes not brought out in the more exact and critical study of the great classical writers, the vital human meaning which they have for all times. But it hardly deserved to be called moral philosophy, nor would it have been regarded in a German university as an interpretation of Aristotle. No one recognised more clearly, or sympathised more with, the human and ethical interest of the book which he had to expound, than Sir Alexander; but he had learned from the lectures on the History of Philosophy, which shortly before that time had been given in Balliol by the present Master of that college, that the book had, in the first place, to be interpreted as an ancient document, in close connection with the whole speculative system of Aristotle, with the previous teaching of Plato, and with the whole moral and political ideas, with the art, life, and sentiment, of the Greek race. This conception of his task imposed upon him a more elaborate study of the works of Aristotle than perhaps any other Oxford man, since Sir W. Hamilton, had given to them; and the result of that study was not only that the treatise was henceforth taught critically and philosophically, but that the vital human interest pervading it was recognised as much deeper than when the work was interpreted vaguely and arbitrarily. The fruit of all his study and teaching appeared in the publication, about the year 1858, of his Edition of the 'Ethics,' which at once became a standard text-book, arid of which a fourth edition was published only about two months ago. The permanent value of the work may be estimated from the fact that, though it has often been criticised, no attempt has yet been